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In music studies, genre theory has primarily been used to study popular music rather than classical music. This article demonstrates how genre theory can be applied to studying classical music production in order to understand how its value is negotiated and reproduced. Drawing on data from interviews with early-career female classical musicians in London, it explores discourses of classical music as a genre in order to understand how genre shapes working lives. We identify three themes within the data: first, genre hierarchies contribute to the (re-)production of divisions of labour, in ways that reaffirm gendered hierarchies. Second, many research participants actively portrayed themselves as being interested in different musical genres, both as listeners and as performers, but identified other classical musicians as having pejorative attitudes towards non-classical genres or practices such as playing in a band. Third, genre hierarchies were (re-)produced in institutional settings, in musicians' working practices and in social interactions. Overall, analysing classical music as a genre through examining the perspectives of freelance musicians shows that subgenres within classical music, as well as classical music itself, are understood relationally to other genres in a hierarchy of value that reaffirms existing inequalities in the cultural labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors wrestle effectively with the inherent issues of music industry research through a cultural/arts administration lens, particularly the lack of an accepted definition of popular music and differing national understandings of what - and who - are part of the music industry. It is worth nothing that the authors have defined popular music as, "the forms and genres of music that are most accessible to, meaningful to, and enjoyed by large numbers of people" (Chen et al. [1]). This reality demands a new understanding of the economic and cultural impacts of the music industry and the roles of national economic and cultural policy in a global music marketplace. [Extracted from the article]